Time Lords
'The Time Lords '''were inhabitants of the planet Gallifrey, who were most famous for the creation and attempted monopolisation of time travel technology. Time Lords were sensitive to timelines, being able to see "all that is, all that was, all that ever could be," but also "what must not be". They were seen as nearly immortal, partially due to their ability to regenerate. The ancient Time Lords were known to take part in battles and conflicts, often helping to hunt species known to be dangerous. One of the last of these was a war against the Great Vampires, which was so long and bloody that they turned against violence in general. For at least part of their history, the Time Lords adhered to a strict policy of non-interference. Despite their attempts to keep up an appearance of being uninterested in the affairs of others, they still sent discreet missions where other Time Lords would act on their behalf. On one occasion, the Fourth Doctor was instructed to intercept the creation of the Dalek race, a step which eventually led to a war between the two species. By the time of the Sixth Doctor, the Time Lords had reigned in "absolute power" for ten million years. During the final day of the Time War, it was claimed the Time Lords' civilisation had lived for a billion years, and they had been time travelling for ten million years. History The Time Lords held absolute power for some ten million years. Finally, it appeared, and was assumed by the Doctor for a time, that the Last Great Time War all but wiped out the race. However, intervention by "all thirteen" incarnations of the Doctor placed the Time Lords into a pocket universe. They later attempted to get the Doctor to release them on Trenzalore and while he did not, due to the threat of a new time war breaking out, the Time Lords saved him from what would have been his thirteenth and final death by granting him a new cycle of regenerations. Under Rassilon, they eventually unfroze Gallifrey and moved it to the end of the universe for protection, at the same time locking the Twelfth Doctor in his confession dial to learn about the Hybrid. The Doctor eventually escaped, overthrew Rassilon, and used Time Lord technology to save Clara Oswald before fleeing Gallifrey once more in another stolen TARDIS. Life Cycle The Eleventh Doctor once said to a group of humans, "We were all jelly once. Little jelly eggs, sitting in goop", indicating that Gallifreyans began as ovum similar to Earth mammals. Time Lords could also be born from individual Family Looms, machines that operated on genetic banks that would weave random patterns until forming a new person. This rendered traditional family units redundant; by the time the Doctor and Susan left Gallifrey, parental relations were viewed as a rare or shocking occurrence. Like humans, Gallifreyans could be male or female. Females were sometimes referred to as Time Ladies. Gender, of course, could change from one regeneration to another. Young Gallifreyans were known as Time Tots, loomlings, or childrene. Some Time Tots were loomed. In many cases, their life cycle seemed to include a phase similar to human childhood. Like human children, Gallifreyan children slept in cribs. Children were entertained with nursery rhymes and stories such as ''Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday. There were specialised books for Gallifreyan children, including Every Gallifreyan Child's Pop-Up Book of Nasty Creatures From Other Dimensions. Many Time Lords were once physically children and at least some lived in homes with others of their own gender before going off to join the Academy or the army. Many Time Lords were loomed as full grown adults. The Tenth Doctor considered himself a "kid" at 90, but after the age of two hundred years, the Third Doctor no longer saw himself as young anymore. They could live for hundreds of years before regenerating. Handrel claimed that Time Lords could live around ten thousand years before regenerating. The Eleventh Doctor physically lived for at least 1,200 years before having to regenerate, resulting in an advanced physical age. However, this was partially due to the fact that for 900 of those years, he was under extreme stress, as well as him no longer being able to regenerate and so his incarnation continued past the point where age would've required him to regenerate. Notably, by the end of that incarnation, he was dying of old age and when he was granted the ability to regenerate once more, he immediately started to do so. The Time Lords had a rite called Soul Catching, which was done to dying Time Lords before they were assimilated into the Matrix. This allowed them to assimilate their memories before they died Time Lords, once they had reached old age, were allowed to leave Gallifrey and retire on another planet. This was very rarely done; Chronotis was the only person known to take up the offer. When a Time Lord eventually died, either through the exhaustion of their regenerations or through circumventing the regeneration process, it was considered necessary to destroy their corpse soon afterwards as, by harvesting the body, one could gain the ability to regenerate and cheat death. River Song claimed many were prepared to go to war to obtain even a single cell. According to Missy, a Time Lord was supposed to face death by meditation: repentance, acceptance and contemplation of the absolute while in an earlier incarnation, the Master commented that Time Lords should face death with dignity. Time Lords had some control over their own deaths, some would elect a specific "Death-Day," which would allow them time to read their will to their family in their ancestral home, to die after a time of contemplation and acceptance, and then to have their mind transferred to the Matrix. Culture Art Time Lords appreciated music, as indicated by such artefacts as the Harp of Rassilon. They also appreciated art, although painting on Gallifrey was done by computer. Time Lord art, known as stasis cubes, were unique in that they were in 3D, as they acted as snapshots of a single moment in time. This meant that they could be used as rudimentary time travel, by freezing a person inside a painting and then letting them out at the required point in time. By the time of the Doctor the Patrexes Chapter specialised in art and aesthetics. Education One of the major institutions of the Time Lords was the Time Lord Academy. It was split up into Chapters, each of which was identified by its distinctive colours. The subjects at the academy ranged from the study of cosmic science to Veteran and Vintage Vehicles to Gallifreyan flutterwings. Children began instruction at the Time Lord Academy, at the age of 8, in a special ceremony. The Gallifreyans would be forced to look into the Untempered Schism, which showed the entirety of the Time Vortex and the power that the Time Lords had. The Gallifreyans subjected to its terrifying effects would react differently: "Some would be inspired, some would run away, and some would go mad." They would then spend "centuries" studying at the Academy. Time Lords took a variety of classes at the Time Lord Academy of which one was recreational mathematics, which included the study of Happy prime numbers. For reasons unknown to Time Lords, a mammoth that fell on and killed a Cro-Magnon became a fixed point. Videos of the event were played for young Time Lords "as a sort of learning experience." Food and Sustenance Gallifreyan physiology provided for a diet similar to the human one, including fruit and flesh, but the Time Lords had long lost the habit of feeding with raw or complex food by the time of the presidency of the Fourth Doctor. Freeze-dried pills were employed instead. Fruit and meat would be eaten on formal occasions, such as holidays, Name Days of Family and Death Days. Such food included fish, Trumpberries, Magenta Fruits and Pig Rats. A Time Lord's tastes - similar to their appearance and mannerisms - were greatly influenced by their regeneration, altering which food and drink they preferred and even which ones they could no longer tolerate. With an enhanced sense of one's internal state and advanced knowledge of chemistry, a Time Lord could - via smell and taste - identify chemical substances and even what chemicals were needed in the body to alter a physical condition. Dress At events like the resignation of a Lord President, Time Lords who attended wore long robes in bright colours. The different colours signified where on Gallifrey each Time Lord had come from: for example, Prydonians wore robes of scarlet and orange, Arcalians wore green, Patrexes wore heliotrope, Scendeles robes changed from light pink to a darker shade of red, Dromiens wore grey, black and silver, and Ceruleans wore subdued blue colours. In addition, most high-ranking Time Lords donned a decorative headdress and crest, complete with a scarlet cap. In the Time War, Gallifreyan residents of the Capitol and Arcadia, including children and the military, wore red clothes. This was mimicked in the scarlet dress of military and government officers. The Doctor repeatedly stated that he disliked Time Lords' hats, calling them "funny" and "dreadful". He also said that Time Lords had "no dress sense" and considered them a "stiff-necked lot". Of those Time Lords seen repeatedly visiting other worlds, such as the Doctor and Romana, they tended to adopt the local dress of their preferred destination - in the Doctor's case, that of Earth - that mixed well with the locals, though Romana adopted the same largely to mimic him. Agents of the enemy, or possibly even the enemy themselves, wore Time Lord regalia in parody of their adversaries. In the Post-War universe, the Onihr treated the collars, skullcaps, and robes as relics necessary to achieve mastery of time. Mysterious alien creatures in Mestizer's manor dressed in the collars and robes when she planned to use the Doctor's "cabinet of light". Romance Due to the fact that a Time Lord could unwillingly swap genders with regeneration, the Time Lords were less concerned about gender roles, despite still calling themselves Lords. Missy once explained that Time Lords were not like animals which were obsessed with sex and mating. The Twelfth Doctor admitted he had a "man crush" on the Master back during their academy days because of how wonderful he was. Politics Domain The Time Lords ruled from the planet Gallifrey, where they would watch the workings of the universe. Though they once had a mighty empire during the Dark Time, the empire collapsed after the fall of the Pythia. Time Lords were originally flexible about manipulating the outcome of certain moments in history. However, they eventually came to fear the consequences of their meddling, noticing how dangerously a change to time could backfire. It became clear that the race had been too reckless when the Time Lords helped the Minyans evolve faster, but found the results disastrous; this led to their non-interference policy. The Time Lords were said to have control over much of the structure of the universe. They had set up the Web of Time and controlled the entire Spiral Politic, up until the edge of their noosphereat the frontier in time. They fixed paradoxes and allowed travel between parallel universes. After the near-extinction of the Time Lords during the Last Great Time War, these processes were in flux. Government The Time Lords were led by the High Council. The Council consisted of the Lord or Lady President, the Lord or Lady Chancellor, the Castellan and Lords Cardinal. Collectively, the Lord President and his or her closest associates from the ruling Houses were called "the Presidency". The Inner Council consisted of the three most powerful members of the High Council. The Lord President was the most powerful member of the Council and had near absolute authority, and used a link to the Matrix, a vast computer network containing the knowledge and experiences of all past generations of Time Lords, to set Time Lord policy and remain alert to potential threats from lesser civilisations. The Lord or Lady Chancellor was next in power and handled many of the government functions. The Castellan controlled the Chancellery Guard and therefore the safety of Gallifrey. The rest of the High Council was made up of the Lords Cardinal, which represented the various Gallifreyan Chapters. During the Last Great Time War, the Visionary was also a member of the council. She acted as a prophet, recording the future, but only with vague predictions written on paper. During the War in Heaven, the War Council seemingly replaced the High Council, debating plans for House Military advances under the supervision of the War King. In the Last Great Time War, the War Council, also known as Gallifrey High Command, were a separate entity from the High Council; the General ignored the High Council's plans to save Gallifrey. They also possessed the ability to give "all thirteen" Doctors the go-ahead to freeze Gallifrey in a pocket universe. During the War in Heaven, Gallifreyan civil servants were all equipped with a psychic tripwire to prevent them from revealing confidential information. Should any of this information be revealed, the tripwire was triggered leading to the civil servant suffering psychic seizure leading to eventual death. It was indicated by the Master that if the Tenth Doctor killed Rassilon, the Lord President at the time, he would become Lord President himself. When the Twelfth Doctor later overthrew Rassilon with the help of Gallifrey's military, he did indeed become Lord President. As Lord President, he had the power to banish both Rassilon and the High Council despite the High Council's status on Gallifrey. Justice The protection of the Time Lords was carried out by the Chancellery Guard. They protected the Capitol, investigated crimes and captured criminals. More secretive or questionable matters were handled by the Celestial Intervention Agency, which was created to be a covert arm of the High Council to safeguard the Time Lords' interests. Much of what they did went against the non-interference policy, leading them to use agents they could easily deny sending (like the Doctor) to protect their secrets. Tens of thousands of years before the Doctor's time, criminals were trapped in Shada, with the intent being that they would be kept there until a suitable punishment could be decided. By the Doctor's time, this method had been phased out and replaced with disintegration. Morbius was executed this way, but managed to survive as just a brain. There were two forms of illegal intervention, both punishable by vaporisation. A Class One was affecting the material properties of a planet, such as axial rotation. A Class Two was when a Time Lord claimed themselves to be a god on a planet. The punishments used for crimes varied in severity. * For his breaking of the non-interference policy, the Second Doctor was forced to regenerate and was exiled to Earth with a non-functioning TARDIS. The same happened with the 34th Doctor but he did not regenerate and the TARDIS was kept by the Council of Time Lords. * Committing genocide would lead to the removal of any remaining regenerations a Time Lord had; artificial species were not considered alive, thus genocide was impossible. * After the Imperator led his army of followers and mercenaries on a crusade against hundreds of cultures around the Spiral Politic, he was tried and publicly executed. * For the various crimes the Master committed, his punishment would have been the reversal of his time stream, such that he had never existed. A similar punishment was carried out on the War Lord for his interference in human history which led to the deaths of thousands; he (and several of his guards) were dematerialised out of existence. The War Lord homeworld had a force field placed around it. * When the Doctor was framed for assassinating the Time Lord President, he would have been vaporised if found guilty. Leisure Young Time Tots were known to keep rovies as pets. Stories of the Shakri were told to the young ones to keep them fearful of doing anything that might get their species eliminated. They were also told fairy tales involving a mythical race known as the Toclafane. Academy students sometimes played a dangerous game called "Eighth Man Bound". The multidimensional game of Perigosto, played with a ball and a specialised Perigosto stick, was also a favourite, as was a complicated board game called Sepulchasm. During a darker, more barbarous time in the planet's past, Time Lords enjoyed watching time-displaced individuals fight to the death in a dedicated area called the Death Zone, but that practice had been entirely abandoned by the Doctor's day. Science and Technology The Time Lords were superlatively advanced in many fields of science, including mathematics, biology, xenobiology, chemistry, and physics. Transport The most characteristic technology used by the Time Lords was their time travel technology of the TARDISes. The TARDIS was derived from the early Gallifreyan technology of the Time Scaphe. The TARDISes were one of the few types of technology that was updated, from the obsolete Type 40 to the more advanced Type 57 along with the Type 70 and the humanoid Type 103. Battle TARDISes and War TARDISes also existed. One of the newer technology developed within the Doctor's lifetime was the Time Rings. These Time Rings were small devices attached around the wrist, allowing a person to travel through time without being in a time machine. They could also be made as small as finger rings that could be touched together to enable time travel. Stellar Manipulation The Time Lords had the capability to control and use the power of stars. The Tenth Doctor went so far as to claim that the Time Lords "invented" black holes. When he threatened Ra and the Ship of a Billion Yearswith the 59th Time Fleet, the War King said that solar engineering was one of the Great Houses' first great achievements. Using the Hand of Omega, the Time Lords could speed up the development of stars. One such star had been exploded but its development into a black hole had been frozen, trapped in a permanent state of decay and was kept either under the Panopticon as the Eye of Harmony to power the civilisation of the Time Lords, or in TARDISes to use as their power source. Weaponry and Defences Despite being one of the most powerful species in the universe, the Time Lords had little in the way of defences and their conventional warfare technology was lagging behind many other civilisations. This may be due in part to the transduction barrier, which covered the planet and which was almost completely impenetrable by outside forces or their general policy of non-interference. As such, when they were invaded by the Sontarans, they were unable to defend themselves with their regular stasers and the Fourth Doctor needed to use an ancient Time Lord weapon called the De-mat Gun. Another weapon used by the Time Lords was the Lord President's personal security sidearm. This gun had no stun setting and a single shot from it would immediately force a regeneration in any Time Lord shot with it. Few Time Lords, even Chancellery Guards, had any real combat experience. However, as war approached, these shortcomings were remedied. During the War in Heaven, the weapons of the Time Lords were considered "legendary"; they had built defensive arrays the size of star systems and created armaments that took apart entire galaxies. During the Last Great Time War, the Capitol was protected by a set of dual turrets set around it. They were used to destroy attacking ships. The operating system of the "galaxy eater" weapon the Moment was so advanced that it had a conscience. Miscellaneous Technology Some other Time Lord technology included the Matrix, Validium, the Genesis Ark and the Chameleon Arch. The Lord President Rassilon had a metallic glove which was capable of destroying a person by shooting out electricity and it reverted the Master Race to its human form. The Time Lords developed a chemical that could turn vertebrate blood into acid, but the Doctor successfully campaigned it to be banned. Rassilon also invented Gallifrey's genetic looms, the devices used to birth new Gallifreyans after the Pythia's curse. Looms were no longer used after the Curse was lifted following President Romana's negotiations with the Sisterhood of Karn. Race or Rank? Several accounts described the Time Lords as a species or a race of Gallifreyans. In contrast, many other accounts suggested that Time Lord was a rank or a social class. The Book of the War synthesised these two perspectives by positing that the Great Houses were a meta-culture, having become something more than a biological species at the anchoring of the thread. The Tenth Doctor described a Time Lord as "so much more" than just biology, instead being a "sum of knowledge, a code, a shared history, and a shared suffering." The Time Lords were referred to by rank, as "Lords," by their sentient technology such as validium. Other time active cultures, like the Pageant, also referred to the Time Lords in this manner, addressing them as aristocracy. Time Lords received the symbiotic nuclei after initiation, which allowed them to safely use TARDISes and regenerate. After a Time Lord's first regeneration, their DNA would change; for instance, they would grow a second heart. However, Newblood Great Houses, like those developed shortly before and during the War in Heaven, bred their members with a second heart, as well as increased control over regeneration. Other sources suggested that the ability for a Time Lord to regenerate came from evolution caused by exposure to the Vortex through the Untempered Schism. Melody Pond's human DNA was able to develop many of the characteristics of Time Lord DNA (such as regeneration) simply by being conceived in the Time Vortex. Many Gallifreyans were not Time Lords. The Fourth Doctor once claimed "not everyone on Gallifrey was a Time Lord — some didn't want to be — and those who did had to go through the Academy". One of the members of the Outsiders claimed that they were once Time Lords before "dropping out". A mansaid that the First Doctor would never "make a Time Lord" at the Academy, so he would have to join the military. Non-Gallifreyan Time Lords Many Time Lords were either completely or partially not Gallifreyan. Dorothy "Ace" McShane became a Time Lord after attending the Time Lord Academy. Upon completing her training, she joined the Celestial Intervention Agency and was given a TARDIS with a functioning chameleon circuit. During various missions for Gallifrey, K9 Mark I was briefed by Time Lords that resembled non-Gallifreyan species. On another occasion, Omegon referred to K9 as a fellow Time Lord. The renegade Great House of Paradox often inducted members of the lesser species into their ranks, going so far as to actually incorporate them into the House's bloodline. The War King said that, while members of Faction Paradox were not members of the Homeworld by blood-right, they had been adopted and given the inherent advantages of all members of the Great Houses, so they were equal to even the members of the War Council. During the War in Heaven, military Houses like House Xianthellipse experimented with hybridisation to create Newblood Houses better adapted for war. Each of House Meddhoran's members had foreign biodata from species, including the Raithaduine. House Lolita had a seat on the War Council, even though its founder and only member, Lolita, was a 101-form timeship. The Osirian Court was so powerful that it was almost a Great House. On Gallifrey, the prophecy of the Hybrid spoke of a being who was created from "two warrior races". Many, including the General and Davros, speculated that the Hybrid was supposed to have been crossed between the Daleks and the Time Lords. Time Lord and human hybrids were known to exist, though in only a handful of cases in the history of the universe. By many accounts, the Doctor himself was half-human on his mother's side. Ashildr speculated that this made the Doctor himself the Hybrid of Gallifreyan lore. Since River Song was conceived on board the Doctor's TARDIS while it was travelling through the Time Vortex, she possessed certain genetic characteristics of a Time Lady, which were brought to the fore by experimentation by the Church. This enabled Melody to regenerate at least twice, into Mels and River Song, before sacrificing her remaining regenerations to revive the Doctor. She retained her respiratory bypass system. In her River Song incarnation, she possessed an augmented lifespan that left her as over two hundred years old not long before her death without much aging from the time she had regenerated into this incarnation. However, it was unclear if this augmented lifespan was a result of her Time Lord DNA or if it was something that River had acquired over her lifetime by other means. A "generated anomaly", Jenny, the artificially created daughter of the Tenth Doctor, had two hearts, but was not a full Time Lord and was unable to regenerate. The Tenth Doctor claimed that Jenny was merely an echo of himself and that being a Time Lord was "so much more" than that, but as he later admitted to Donna Noble, "when I look at Jenny now, I can see them. The hole they left, all the pain that filled it." Jenny was later revived from a bullet wound by the Source. The Tenth Doctor said his "Time Lord DNA" was mixed up in the composition of the Dalek-humans' human and Dalek DNA after he got in the way of the lightning strike that created the Dalek-humans. The Meta-Crisis Doctor, a single-hearted, non-regenerating Time Lord/human hybrid, was created by a biological meta-crisis in which Donna Noble and the Tenth Doctor's DNA merged. He was born from the Doctor's eleventh regeneration. After committing genocide against Davros' new Daleks, he was left on an alternate Earth where he began a life with Rose Tyler. Donna Noble said that Davros giving Donna's synapses "that little extra spark, kicking them into life" by waking up the dormant regeneration energy in her head had made her "part human, part Time Lord." The Tenth Doctor said this event made her a "human being with a Time Lord brain." However, her human brain was unable to process the Time Lord influence beyond a few hours, so the Doctor was forced to wipe her memory of her adventures of him.